Previews

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

The greatest videogame character you've never played is preparing his comeback.

Spiffy:

A witty spoof of conventions and cliches wrapped up in the guise of an action game.

Iffy:

Shooting mechanics and gameplay aren't bad, so far, but don't stand out much.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard seems to aspire to be many things. It's a third-person shooter in the vein of Gears of War. It's an absurd spoof in the vein of God Hand. It also pokes fun at the sort of celebrity fixation that VH1's "Behind the Music" is famous for re-enacting. We're not sure if it'll be all things for all people, but we can't deny that it made us laugh more than once when D3 brought it to our offices last week.

Eat Lead tells the tale of chrome-domed soldier Matt Hazard, the (arguably) world's most famous videogame character, as he mounts a comeback from some career duds with a new shooter from super-publisher Marathon Megasoft. Little does he realize that company president Wally Wellesley is aiming to kill him off. He's accompanied by QA, who more than resembles a feminine AI made famous in a series of popular first-person shooters. The team behind the humor is NC-based Vicious Cycle, whose last game was the well-received PSP title Dead Head Fred. With Eat Lead, the developer appears to be toeing the line between conventional approaches to gaming and spoofing those very conventions. Case in point: Although the game is loaded with celebrity voices, such as "Arrested Development"'s Will Arnett as the titular character and Neil Patrick Harris as his nemesis, it's also poking fun at videogames themselves in a way that the likes of "Grandma's Boy" couldn't quite nail.

There are jokes in the vein of "The Tick," in which Matt finishes up work for the day and hangs out after-hours with other game characters. We'll be curious to see where the rest of it goes. One of our favorite Hazard misfires was a third-person action shooter with waterguns called Soak-'Em (repeat it to yourself quickly) that was a critical disaster alongside Haz-Mat Kart. Even before we got to the dialogue, the cut-scene that lays out the plot is pretty funny stuff, at least if you're a longtime gamer.

Our first section took us to the Fragmee Warehouse, where Matt must make use of whatever arms are available. In this case, it's high-powered water pistols, a reference to the aforementioned franchise flop. Eat Lead's shooting mechanics ape the now-standard over-the-shoulder shooting that so many titles of the genre have adopted, so you shouldn't have too much trouble adjusting to cover and gunplay. The game offers Matt the ability to stay in cover along multiple surfaces; if he's hiding behind, say, a forklift, he can slide around to another side of the vehicle without detaching from safety to reposition himself. It's subtle, but nifty.